A conjuration of ancient consciousness aimed at rehumanizing our contemporary cyborg condition. "Referring to the American continent, 'Abya Yala' ('land of life') is a pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia. Harrison wrestles with language, racism, and humanity in political and spiritual poems."--Publishers Weekly, Most Anticipated Poetry Books, Spring 2024 "Abya Yala"--"land of life" or "land of vital blood"--is a Pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia to refer to the American continent and more recently has signified the idea of a decolonized "New World" among various Indigenous movements. In Isthmus to Abya Yala, Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison summons a mythic consciousness in response to this political and spiritual struggle. In his poems, with mystic fervor, Harrison finds phonetic unities concealing conceptual oppositions he must transcend. Invoking "mobilian" as an ur-language against racism and toward an all-inclusive humanity--in opposition to the "mobile" of phone-mediated existence--the poems of Isthmus to Abya Yala burn with a visionary ardor that overpowers rationality through an intensive accumulation of imagery. They even sometimes manifest as visual poems in the form of drawings he calls "Tecs," opposing the dominance of technology to the advocacy of pan-Indian nationhood by 19th century Shawnee leader Tecumseh. "Tecumseh Republic" is the poet's name for a new post-racial, post-national, post-binary, post-colonial, holistic and earth-oriented society with no national borders, with Panamá, the isthmus, as its only entry and exit.

Isthmus to Abya Yala: City Lights Spotlight Series #23 (City Lights Spotlight, 23)

Literature & Fiction

Harrison, Roberto

Poetry

City Lights Publishers

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "In these strange, open-eyed, open- hearted, beautiful poems, there is nowhere to stand, or there is everywhere specific. I feel as if I am looking at Borges' aleph: sacred mutating representatives of every category—weather animals language pain geographies software—announce themselves, declare connectednesses I'd never have predicted. This journey, this snake moves through lived experience like breath from the underside of time."—Catherine Wagner

culebra

Green Lantern Press

Tropical Lung is a collection of writings and drawings from and to a new homeland, a vision of Panamá and the Tecumseh Republic where technology is necessary for understanding the ancient, then is erased and transcended by an ever-present electronic circle. Roberto Harrison combines poetry and visual art in this surrealist vision of a world both historical and reborn, where the futuristic links to the ancient. Harrison looks to symbolic beginnings, spaces of light and mystery that counter disassociation with explorations of the foundational structures of personhood.\nTropical Lung shows how apocalypses can give us the keys to new futures and how aloneness and silence can lead us to live multidimensionally, beyond the boundaries of time and space. The screen makes itself known and offers a means of kinship, but it is also removed by song and born in the red of encounter and the dark of seven pupils. These wild visions coalesce into a fantastic vision of a future both technological and communal.

Tropical Lung: exi(s)t(s)

Omnidawn

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "The relentless creaking, whistling, howling, and ultimately devouring power of the American jungles comes through in virtually every one of these poems. In the great tradition of Latin American poets who've striven to sensually and intelligently sing of the terrible passage to regeneration, Harrison (adept and hip to that tradition) adds a new element: memory buffer overrun of historical consciousness. Continually refreshing our memory through a wild "real-time" syntax, OS neither gets snowed in by the Northern Obsession of perception for perception's sake (as ever-redeeming spirit), nor swamped by the Symbolist Ritualisms of a pre-lapsarian South. Could this be bio-conductivity's first run at poetry?"-Rodrigo Toscano.

United States

Subpress

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Roberto Harrison's Daemons are loops (as in computer-generated, or installations using sound) yet his series of continuous loops does not repeat but adds: to make being 'in the wilderness full.' The first person, as if that were only an operation, merges with the author himself who's only a marker 'in the raftering circuits.' His poems replicate to invent oracles as counters to image- making."—Leslie Scalapino "Roberto Harrison's COUNTER DAEMONS offers tremendous reach, a vision of a world that has come into its own cybernetic post-surrealism without ever quite acknowledging just how nightmare tinges the dream. There's subtlety &amp; grandeur, even wry wit at the edge of the apocalypse. Read this book &amp; you will look at the world differently. And you will definitely, absolutely, positively never look at the first person singular in the same way again."—Ron Silliman

Counter Daemons

Litmus Press

Poetry. BRIDGE OF THE WORLD maps multiple transits between mental, spiritual, and geographic topographies, pivoting on the experience of dislocation from Panama and Latinidad. This is a journey over bridges between inner and outer worlds, between the cosmic and the material, the past and the present, and the immediate and memory. Traversing is bound up in the alienations of migration, economic disparity, the violations of capitalism, and the cosmic betrayals in the struggle to hold onto love in the place of rage. Harrison's is a poetics that explores psychological fragmentation as the natural condition of a life lived suspended in multiple in- betweens. Place is colossal, mundane objects swell with symbolism, time and memory warp, and plague the mind and poetry with visions. These poems are glutted with the revelation and pain that braid themselves through the poet's living—a brave and undulating work that invites us into a love defiant and resolutely alive.

Bridge of the World

Poetry.A book of transformation, Roberto Harrison's bicycle proposes the incredible two-wheeled velocipede as the newest vehicle of enlightenment. The lines of the verse are spokes, the stanzas the strokes of the thighs as they peddle through a recurrent but new teaching. At once subtle and earnest, bicycle is magically perceptive and gentle and wise. There is nothing else like it. Harrison is a master. Peter O'Leary  The accumulation of almost four years of daily exercises in bike riding, meditation and writing, bicycle works through the ineluctable phenomenon of appearances to the essence of existence, a process that is, for Harrison, as it is for certain strands in Western (Plato, Heidegger, etc.) and Eastern (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) thought, temporal. These poems' emphatic celebration of process and connectivity put the lie of ritual to ritual. Thus lines like "the caskets/full of faces/and hands/that leak" and "this leak for hate that bleeds" collapse physical death and moral outrage back into their "places' within an infinite continuum. For Harrison, his homeland of Panama, "the snake that pulls its own/ from oceans," is "the kiss/ that is always an isthmus," a literal and metaphoric connector. And though Panama, like all lands, appears set in the stone of culture and geographic stability, this is an illusion, an index of historical myopia. . . .bicycle is an enactment of movement itself, a series of anti-narrative narratives that move back and forth as healing cauterizations, as geographical and cultural sediments, the residues of what comes next, the fate of every form of sentient and non-sentient being, e.g., human and empire: "i am proof/that America/will die." Tyrone Williams The outcome of two of four years' ascetic endurance in the form of biking, meditation, and writing through all sublimities and cruelties of quotidian life and Milwaukee weather, Roberto Harrison's perseverant sentences--issuing forth as spliced tensile lines--enact in their cycling a vulnerable concatenation of multitudes across the segregated poles of north and south, surveyor and surveilled, bleach and wound. Harrison's verse might at first appear surrealist, but it labors to divulge actual material and philosophical linkages in spite of all "social / crevices"--and to spite the complicity of participation in the mere "network," which "begins and ends with ownership." Listen "in this / that places all / the planets / on the phone" for the "dust of disconnected mouths" that, consolidated, builds both the hope of solidarity in the welter of ache and "the stitched exit that a mind makes." Jennifer Scappettone   

bicycle

Noemi Press

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